


skin graph

by lagazzraladra



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Dissociation, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 07:10:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1596107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lagazzraladra/pseuds/lagazzraladra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What he is, is not what he ever was before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	skin graph

`the ground I want to explore`   
`doesn't feel like before`   
`[...]`   
`the skin i'm in feels ordinary`   
`the things that you might like`   
`don't grow inside of me`

\---

You are pulled from a river, with just the barest hints of life still clinging to your fragile, broken, crooked frame. You are only vaguely aware of your mind’s connection to your body; it’s a presence you can just barely feel in the back of your mind, like an itch. There is another itch in the back of your mind, and you recognize it as the sensation of no longer having your left arm, of feeling your life blood slowly but surely pump out of your body with each continuing breath.

Footsteps sound close by: heavy boots crunching in the snow, heavy boots crunching your bones. The heavy boots stop close by your head and make a comment, and then They call over other heavy boots. They gather around you pressing close against your sides, whispering in a language you do not understand.

Your body that is cold and wet and numb and useless - They drag it through the mud and snow. Your skin burns from where it presses sharp against the ice. your lungs ache and strain as your nostrils fill up with snow,  and your right arm is twisted at an awkward and painful angle. All you can think, and you can barely think at this point, is _Leave my body behind, let me go._ The pain of still being connected is unbearable. You want to scream, you try to scream, but you cannot.

You will never scream again.

\---

The next time you remember coming back to consciousness, you find that you are strapped to an operating table and that your mind is too firmly situated in your body. You are no longer experiencing the high of drifting half-in, half-out of your physical form that you felt out in the cold and wet and snow, but more of the sensation that you (think) you associate with being spectacularly hung-over.

Of course, you are not hung-over.

You are strapped to an operating table. You are in excruciating pain. Your left arm is missing from the elbow down and someone is trying to saw the rest of it off.

Despite any previous feelings you may have had about no longer belonging within your own body, you are still struck with a feeling of pure possessiveness when you see the saw digging into your flesh. One thought runs through your mind: _Me._ And then you are filled with immeasurable amounts of rage; how dare someone try to take _Me_ away from you?

You shake, you stutter, you try to call out, try to break free from your restraints, but despite the adrenalin coursing through your veins, you find that you cannot break away. Men quite shoes and long coats sweep in and cover your body with Their hands, pushing you down, down, down, down.

Then, a familiar, wicked face swims into your vision, and somewhere else in the room the steady beeping noise of some machine picks up, rapidly. You are vaguely aware of the fact that that beeping noise may or may not be a heart monitor, and that that heart monitor may or may not be hooked up to your own body. You are also vaguely, _just vaguely,_ aware of the fact that this might be related to you experiencing fear.

Needles press into your arm sharp and clear and you grit your teeth against the pain. There’s a lot of pain, but after that?

Nothing hurts after that; you feel nothing at all.

\---

Your arm cannot hold on to the slippery metal tightly enough and your fingers loosen. The muscles in your strain in protest and your joints pop and crack .

You scream.

It is the last time.

\---

When you finally sift through the fog that is your mind, you find yourself sitting on the edge of a cot. You don’t remember entering the room and you certainly don’t remember ever sleeping on the cot, yet here you are.

You get up and pace around the room. It’s concrete, there aren’t any windows, there’s one door, and the cot you came back to yourself on has no frame, no blankets. The only other thing in the room is a bucket - which, you know what that’s for - and your body.

You pace around the room some more, count the steps it takes to get you from side to the other, from one corner to the other, around the entire perimeter. The entire time your body weighs in the back of your mind, dead weight. You go through the motions of motion and barely feel it.

There’s a noise from the door that jolts you out of your pacing. A hatch slides back and a plate of food is pushed through, and then closed immediately afterwards. You stumble over to the door, grab the tray, and take it back to your cot, where you start to dig into your food like an animal, using only your fingers. You’re honestly not sure when you last had a meal. You’re honestly not sure of anything.

And then you finally notice it: your arm is metal now. However, in some odd way, you are not frightened by that fact. Instead, it causes you smile tightly because know you know at least one thing:

You will not lose your grip again.

\---

_In a small alley in Brooklyn an even smaller boy is almost beaten to a pulp._

_"Pick on someone your own size!"_

_You help the boy to his feet._

_You do not let go._

You jolt awake.

As the weeks have progressed, you've forgotten more and more things about who and what you were before They picked you up, before They made you. One by one, you can feel the things that make you slipping, falling away, much like your body does sometimes if you stare at the ceiling for too long.

Yet there’s _this_ one memory that persists, _this_ one thing about who you were Before that you've yet to forget. And, to be honest, you’re not sure whether to be thankful for that or not. ‘Cause this plays on loop behind your eyelids like some kind of horrific movie, except, you don’t think you've ever seen one of those before. Or, if you have, you just don’t remember it.

It's not just the remembering of it that's making you hurt; its not knowing the _significance_ of it. That’s whats killing you.

Memories are useless without context.

\---

They give you your first Mission.

You do not know who They are, but you know that They have created you. You know that they have torn you down and built you back up again, and that they will do it again. Their directions, their plans for you all culminate as The Mission – that great ineffable plan – which has been carefully wired into your brain, until The Mission flows as freely as your own thoughts, until you do not have your own thoughts, you have only Theirs.

To assist you on the Mission, They give you a uniform, guns, knives, grenades; all the trappings of a Great Soldier. Twenty miles out from Their – _your_ – destination, They drop you out of a C-47.

No, no, no, no.

You parachute out of a C-47. Voluntarily.

You walk close to 13 miles that day: from the time they you left the plane at dawn, until the sun begins to set beyond the horizon. Then you stop, you find and kill a rabbit, eat it raw. As night creeps over the sky and stars begin to blink into existence, you wrap yourself in a blanket and hide yourself in a make-shift snow drift shelter. According to Them, you can’t make a fire, because it would draw attention to you and compromise the Mission. And you don’t want to do that.

At the crack of dawn, you start up again and walk the remaining eight, uneventful miles to the Destination. Once you reach the Destination, you take a moment to relive yourself behind a tree, and _damn_  it feels good to not be pissing in a bucket anymore. And then-

You walk into a town of a hundred.

You walk out alone.

\---

 _You are our greatest tool, our greatest success,_ They tell you, especially the man with the familiar, wicked face, _especially_ him.

He visits often, usually with congratulations on a Mission well-done, sometimes with up-grades for your arm, sometimes just for a ‘friendly’ chat, sometimes with punishment for a Mission gone-wrong.

And punishment means the Ice.

\---

You can usually run four or five Missions between being put on the Ice.

After five Missions, you start making mistakes, and mistakes compromise the Mission, and compromised Missions go wrong, and Missions that go wrong _have_ to have punishments. Their rules.

For example:

There’s a Mission in some hot, wet place, it’s your fifth one in a row, and you fucked it up by reading a newspaper.

The language has been programmed into your brain per the requirements of this particular Mission, so reading it is no problem and picking it up? Picking it up comes as second nature, just something to do while you sit around waiting for your cab to take you to the Destination.

And that was your first mistake, because picking up a paper is not something someone should do if they’ve been programmed to _not_ have second nature. It reveals faulty programming and faulty programming leads to overall Mission Failure.

So, you read the newspaper and see the date: 1964.

You thought it was 1945.

It feels like your whole world gets swallowed up in this realization, and you disconnect completely from _everything_. The next time you wake up, the familiar man looms over you and says,

“You failed Us.”

\---

Another example:

The Mission is to kill an entire family, and you hesitate at the last moment to kill the youngest son, a fifteen year-old. Something about him is achingly familiar, and that’s what causes your hand to stay on the trigger. And your hand staying on the trigger is what allows the boy to take the extra moment to dial 911.

You kill him, but by then it’s too late and the call has been made. Police, maybe even FBI, will crawling all over the scene in thirty minutes or less; you've got to get out of there. Yet, you can’t move, you’re dumbstruck. Taking a look at the mess you've made, you almost can’t believe that you've done this. Its sloppy work and you don’t even understand why its sloppy, you don’t understand _why_ you hesitated.

But They know (They always know), and They are not happy with you.

\---

Moral of the story: the Mission is everything. If you fail the Mission, punishment _must_ be doled out, order depends on it.

And that is why the Ice waits for no one; not even you, its greatest success. And so They bleed out the twist in your stomach with years at a time under the ice, so that you will never feel guilt again.

And They manage to do it.

Except each time They de-freeze you, you’re a little _less_. A little less than you were before, and you honestly weren’t that much to begin with. You keep waking up with more dead eyes and less speech capability and less and less and le-

But, overall more you are becoming a more and more effective Soldier, which is all that They really want anyway.

And They’re constantly weighing the pros and cons of the situation, evaluating your performance to make better, more effective decisions about you for the future. Once, you over-hear two men with thick DC accents speaking about you:

"I think, I think if we wipe him after each Mission, he won't have to spend as much time on the Ice."

Your vision goes fuzzy here, but you can see them move across the room to look at a chart.

"Yeah," says the Other one. "I see what you mean. Less time on the Ice, more time for the Mission."

They don't give a fuck that you might be perpetually disconnected from your own body - not even feeling that dead weight in the back of your head anymore - so, they implement the Wiping program immediately. Who gives a shit that you're coming apart at the seems? You can run nine Missions in a row now. You’re getting the job done, and that’s all that counts.

Pros and cons, pros and cons.

\---

Sometimes when you wake up from the Ice, you do not know the year (you don’t think that you have ever known the year).

You only ever know the Mission, and the Mission is always to kill.

\---

She is red.

Red lips, red hair, red blood that pools on your tongue when you press against her hot and tight, your teeth digging into her arm relieved to find flesh there and not metal. Relieved to know that she is not one-hundred percent Theirs, that she could still be yours and yours only.

She tells you the year, “It’s 1992,” and she tells you that she thinks she's from Russia and on a Mission to Berlin in '93 she tells you about the time that she killed a man with her bare hands for the Motherland and she tells you and she tells you and -

You think you might love her.

\---

She disappears in 2001, at least, that's what year she thinks it is. You've never been able to keep track of the dates, but she has. It's perhaps the one small amount of treachery They let her get away with. 

She's kept you off the Ice for over a decade, and you're not sure what the point of that was but you are so,  _so_ thankful for that.

But now that she's gone, you're so,  _so_ afraid to forget.

\---

The needles make you forget everything, everything except the Mission and how to kill.

\---

They send other girls to you after her, to train, you think.

You rip them open and the bleed red across the floor of your white room.

But not as red as her.

\---

You’re in New York City, on a Mission (you are always on a Mission).

You walk past a newspaper stand and see a familiar face which makes no sense. You know no familiar faces, yet – here one is. The date on the magazine says 2012.

You spend too long starring, trying to decode the message behind the cover of this magazine, and helicopter blades begin to echo in your ears.

You must finish the mission.

\---

_"Where are we going?"_

_"The future!"_

You haven’t had a memory like this in centuries.

What is _happening_ to you?

\---

 

They are not happy and the helicopter blades press angrily against your back. There are more needles than before (you think).

You slip and fall and land with a sickening thud on the metal floor.

A voice calls from the distance, but it is not your voice because you tongue is swollen grotesquely in your mouth.

Images flash before your mind's eye; hard lines, gentle curves; soft lips crusted with dried blood and pale chapped ones; the scent of death mingling with the scent of ladies' perfume and the smell of gun-smoke and foxholes; green eyes that pierce straight through you in darkened alleys and artificially brightened training rooms and blue eyes that you can see glinting in bar lights; red hair that dances across skin like a shock of blood and blond hair that bo-

\---

red, red, red, red, red, red, red, re-

\---

blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue Blue eyes and a blue light and a voice that sounds like the blue of the sky after snow.

\---

You have traveled everywhere; deserts, jungles, crowded cities, abandoned hideaways. They all have one thing in common: there is someone there that has to die (there is always someone who has to die).

You get the blood and grit and dust of these places in your lungs and under your skin, but they will never be part of you. You hunger for the snow where blood can paint the land like watercolors on a canvas. The place where you were created and recreated a thousand times over. The place where you parachuted out of C-47, the place where everyone you met had an American accent, the place where they gave you your directions, the place where-

You had become – been _made_ into a Soldier of Winter.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this is a re-write of an older work from 2012. it's been reworked to fit into a longer series i'm working on, that revolves around the idea that the Winter Soldier was HYDRA/US operative during the Cold War and _not_ KGB. yes i know i put black widow in there, but it'll make sense later. stay tuned.


End file.
